A computer aided lexicography tool for making dictionaries on historical principles

Despite the long standing tradition of lexicography that Arabic prides itself on, the language does not have a dictionary that states the origin of words and that traces their development across time. Several attempts have been made at it recently but failed, resulting in frustration and in the conclusion that the task is daunting. The main reason for failure is the sheer volume of work required. In this paper, we present a computational tool that would facilitate the compilation of an Arabic dictionary on historical principles. There are no openly available tools for Arabic dictionary making; if they do exist, they are jealously guarded for their commercial value; hence, they are unavailable to scholars who might want to take part in the grand endeavor of building an etymological Arabic dictionary. This research shall make its tool available to the open source community to encourage further development and refinement. The computational tool can also be used in the development of computer-assisted language learning software. Concordances, for example, are by-products of this research, yet they are invaluable to the teaching of grammar and morphology; they encourage learning by discovery.